UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Dehumanization is a common tactic all colonizers and settler-colonizers have been using throughout human history. All colonizers and genocidal regimes convince themselves (and all the bystanders out there) that they are not committing any crime, that in killing millions of their fellow human beings they are in fact doing something virtuous, essential and even godly. It is necessary to dehumanize victims so the job of harming, killing and displacing them is not only made easier but is in fact possible at all. Most people would not harm one another when they feel empathy and relate to each other’s experience… We see one such case unfolding in Palestine right in front of our noses and no one is doing anything about it.

David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, referring to the displaced Palestine people in 1949, said, “The old will die and the young will forget.” For over 70 years, the Palestinian people have resisted the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the forced displacement from their homeland, living under military rule, administrative detention, and genocidal policies of collective punishment and blockade. The old have passed on the history of the Palestinian people and the young have learned, remembered and continued the fight for self-determination.

As the senators discussed, the back wall lined with students holding signs with phrases including, “Trips to stolen Palestinian land say OK to settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.”The trip in question was one taken by 24 Georgia State students over the winter break, including members of SGA, Spotlight, the College Republicans, the Catholic Student Association and The Signal’s editor-in-chief, Daniel Varitek.

The ethics of educating the world about the Holocaust obligates, prima facie, respecting the rights of all human beings, especially the rights of the downtrodden and the subjugated minorities who are targeted for displacement and genocide. Needless to say, the Holocaust’s logic of “never again” is universal and not the property of any specific ethnicity. It is not any group’s proprietary slogan. I hereby declare to the offending group that we, the Palestinian common folk, share in the rebellious outrage of “never again” as much as any other downtrodden human group. It is yours, ours and the Rohingyas’ equally.

Israeli nationalism relies on interpretations of history that occurred both in the 20th century and thousands of years ago, and the supposed ‘anti-Israel’ bias of UNESCO shows how important these events are to Israel’s national story. No one wants to live in a country responsible for genocide. How can one have pride in a place like that? It would be easier to imagine it didn’t happen, rather than come to terms with it. In the US, for instance, some high school textbooks still treat the Civil War as a matter of ‘states’ rights’ and not slavery.

Even though doctors in Gaza knew protocols to prevent the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, persistent shortages of antibiotics meant they could not always follow them, they told reporters. Patients take incomplete courses of antibiotics or are prescribed a mix because the right medicine is not available.

Shortages of water, power and fuel for generators mean doctors cannot always meet even basic hygiene standards, making it easier for any drug-resistant infection to spread. At times doctors are not even able to wash their hands and there are shortages of gloves, gowns and chlorine tablets for disinfecting.

The United Nations has indicated the forced expulsion represented crimes against humanity and may have been driven by “genocidal intent,” wrote the site in an article “Asia’s version of Palestine emerging in Bangladesh”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s son has recently said h e’d “prefer if all the Muslims leave the land of Israel”. Facebook temporarily banned the despicable thug from his habitual racism and deleted that call for genocide. But he was just airing what his father and other Zionist warlords have been practising for decades in Palestine.

Zionists claim historical Palestine from the “river to the sea” through the implementation of Eretz Israel, the greater Israel vision, which is the current policy on the ground. The unfolding Eretz Israel plan undertaken by successive Zionist Israeli leaders has translated into exile, dispossession and daily torment for Palestinians inside all of historical Palestine. Palestinians face real and substantiated acts of genocide and never-ending documented war crimes daily in the process and the long road toward implementation of Eretz Israel, but no word is uttered or allowed to be uttered on CNN or any of the mainstream media outlets.